Debasis Sadhukhan

Quantum discord and its allies: a review of recent progress

We review concepts and methods associated with quantum discord and related topics. We also describe their possible connections with other aspects of quantum information and beyond, including quantum communication, quantum computation, many-body physics, and open quantum dynamics. Quantum discord in the multiparty regime and its applications are also discussed.

Quantum discord length is enhanced while entanglement length is not by introducing disorder in a spin chain

Classical correlations of ground states typically decay exponentially and polynomially, respectively for gapped and gapless short-ranged quantum spin systems. In such systems, entanglement decays exponentially even at the quantum critical points. However, quantum discord, an informationtheoretic quantum correlation measure, survives long lattice distances. We investigate the effects of quenched disorder on quantum correlation lengths of quenched averaged entanglement and quantum discord, in the anisotropic XY and XY Z spin glass and random field chains. We find that there is virtually neither reduction nor enhancement in entanglement length while quantum discord length increases significantly with the introduction of the quenched disorder.Classical correlation functions of ground states typically decay exponentially and polynomially, respectively, for gapped and gapless short-range quantum spin systems. In such systems, entanglement decays exponentially even at the quantum critical points. However, quantum discord, an information-theoretic quantum correlation measure, survives long lattice distances. We investigate the effects of quenched disorder on quantum correlation lengths of quenched averaged entanglement and quantum discord, in the anisotropic XY and XYZ spin glass and random field chains. We find that there is virtually neither reduction nor enhancement in entanglement length while quantum discord length increases significantly with the introduction of the quenched disorder.

Reducing computational complexity of quantum correlations

We address the issue of reducing the resource required to compute information-theoretic quantum correlation measures such as quantum discord and quantum work deficit in two qubits and higher-dimensional systems. We show that determination of the quantum correlation measure is possible even if we utilize a restricted set of local measurements. We find that the determination allows us to obtain a closed form of quantum discord and quantum work deficit for several classes of states, with a low error. We show that the computational error caused by the constraint over the complete set of local measurements reduces fast with an increase in the size of the restricted set, implying usefulness of constrained optimization, especially with the increase of dimensions. We perform quantitative analysis to investigate how the error scales with the system size, taking into account a set of plausible constructions of the constrained set. Carrying out a comparative study, we show that the resource required to optimize quantum work deficit is usually higher than that required for quantum discord. We also demonstrate that minimization of quantum discord and quantum work deficit is easier in the case of two-qubit mixed states of fixed ranks and with positive partial transpose in comparison to the corresponding states having nonpositive partial transpose. Applying the methodology to quantum spin models, we show that the constrained optimization can be used with advantage in analyzing such systems in quantum information-theoretic language. For bound entangled states, we show that the error is significantly low when the measurements correspond to the spin observables along the three Cartesian coordinates, and thereby we obtain expressions of quantum discord and quantum work deficit for these bound entangled states.

Emergence of entanglement with temperature and time in factorization-surface states

There exist zero-temperature states in quantum many-body systems that are fully factorized, thereby possessing vanishing entanglement, and hence being of no use as resource in quantum information processing tasks. Such states can become useful for quantum protocols when the temperature of the system is increased, and when the system is allowed to evolve under either the influence of an external environment, or a closed unitary evolution driven by its own Hamiltonian due to a sudden change in the system parameters. Using the one-dimensional anisotropic XY model in a uniform and an alternating transverse magnetic field, we show that entanglement of the thermal states, corresponding to the factorization points in the space of the system parameters, revives once or twice with increasing temperature. We also study the closed unitary evolution of the quantum spin chain driven out of equilibrium when the external magnetic fields are turned off, and show that considerable entanglement is generated during the dynamics, when the initial state has vanishing entanglement. Interestingly, we find that creation of entanglement for a pair of spins is possible when the system is made open to an external heat bath, interacting through that spin-pair having a repetitive quantum interaction.

Beating no-go theorems by engineering defects in quantum spin models

Diverse no-go theorems exist, ranging from no-cloning to monogamies of quantum correlations and Bell inequality violations, which restrict the processing of information in the quantum world. In a multipartite scenario, monogamy of Bell inequality violation and the exclusion principle of dense coding are such theorems which impede the ability of the system to have quantum advantage between all its parts. In ordered spin systems, the twin restrictions of translation invariance and monogamy of quantum correlations, in general, enforce the bipartite states to be neither Bell inequality violating nor dense codeable. We show that it is possible to conquer these constraints imposed by quantum mechanics in ordered systems by introducing quenched impurities in the system while still retaining translation invariance at the physically relevant level of disorder-averaged observables.

Multipartite entanglement accumulation in quantum states: Localizable generalized geometric measure

Multiparty quantum states are useful for a variety of quantum information and computation protocols. We define a multiparty entanglement measure based on local measurements on a multiparty quantum state, and an entanglement measure averaged on the post-measurement ensemble. Using the generalized geometric measure as the measure of multipartite entanglement for the ensemble, we demonstrate, in the case of several well-known classes of multipartite pure states, that the localized multipartite entanglement can exceed the entanglement present in the original state. We also show that measurement over multiple parties may be beneficial in enhancing localizable multipartite entanglement. We point out that localizable generalized geometric measure faithfully signals quantum critical phenomena in well-known quantum spin models even when considerable finite-size effect is present in the system.

Statistics of leading digits leads to unification of quantum correlations

We show that the frequency distribution of the first significant digits of the numbers in the data sets generated from a large class of measures of quantum correlations, which are either entanglement measures or belong to the information-theoretic paradigm, exhibit a universal behavior. In particular, for Haar uniformly simulated arbitrary two-qubit states, we find that the first-digit distributions corresponding to a collection of chosen computable quantum correlation quantifiers tend to follow the first-digit law, known as Benfords law, when the rank of the states increases. Considering a two-qubit state which is obtained from a system governed by paradigmatic spin Hamiltonians, namely, the XY model in a transverse field, and the XXZ model, we show that entanglement as well as information-theoretic measures violate Benfords law. We quantitatively discuss the violation of Benfords law by using a violation parameter, and demonstrate that the violation parameter can signal quantum phase transitions occurring in these models. We also comment on the universality of the statistics of the first significant digits corresponding to appropriate measures of quantum correlations in the case of multipartite systems as well as systems in higher dimensions.